The U.S. House of Representatives approved a temporary patch for the near-empty federal Highway Trust Fund last week after state leaders nationwide warned of dire road conditions and job cuts if they failed to do so. The House approved $10 billion to continue to pay for freeway projects for the next 10 months.

States depend on the federal trust fund for between 15 and nearly 60 percent of their overall funding for highway and transit projects. Thousands of new projects and maintenance fixes were at risk because the fund was going to run out of money in August, and Congress, as usual, was gridlocked.

Congress really ought to be ashamed of itself. This temporary fix is yet another kick-the-can move, and the highway trust fund has been flirting with bankruptcy since 2008. The source of conflict is the usual one: Democrats want to increase revenues for the fund, and Republicans insist on offsetting any increases with spending cuts.

The fund's major source of revenue, the federal gas tax, hasn't increased since 1993, so an increase of some sort is inevitable. The National Conference of State Legislatures sent Congress a letter last week urging lawmakers to bring the fund to solvency. The stakes are high: In California, the most recent crisis jeopardized $2 billion worth of construction and rehabilitation projects. And according to a White House report released this week, California has the highest annual consumer cost due to bad roads in the country.

Increasingly, states have been taking matters into their own hands. Since 2013, a number of states including Maryland, Vermont and Wyoming have raised their state gasoline taxes. Virginia replaced its gasoline tax with a higher sales tax to increase funding certainty.

In Oregon, lawmakers are trying a pilot program that charges motorists for miles driven instead of raising money through gasoline purchases. Oregon's experiment will be carefully watched both in the Western United States (where 11 states, including California, are studying similar ones) and in Washington.

Many transportation economists advocate taxing drivers based on miles traveled, since it's a more accurate account of how much stress a driver puts on the road. It's also a way to keep transportation funds flowing as more and more consumers turn to hybrids and other fuel-efficient cars.

There are big concerns with this approach, too - namely the privacy ones. (Drivers will have to report their mileage to the government, probably with the use of GPS devices.) Supporters explain that, thanks to the ubiquity of cell phones and the fact that many new cars already come with GPS devices, the government already knows where you are - though that's anything but comforting.

Still, experiments with new ways to fund the repair of our country's broken roads aren't just interesting - they're necessary, since Congress has failed to lead. The least that Congress can do is its job, which means passing a longer-term bill to keep the fund from going bankrupt.